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From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
|
2007 January 1 |
The oldest currently published newspaper in the world, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (Post and Domestic Newspaper), the government newspaper and gazette of Sweden, published on paper without interruption since 1645, switches over to an Internet-only format. |
January |
The the February issue of Wired Kevin Kelly writes: "Information is expanding 10 times faster than any product on this planet - manufactured or natural. According to Hal Varian, an economist at UC Berkeley and a consultant to Google, worldwide information is increasing at 66 percent per year - approaching the rate of Moore's Law - while the most prolific manufactured stuff - paper, let’s say, or steel - averages only as much as 7 percent annually." |
| In the February issue of Wired James Gleick writes: "Is the universe actually made of information? Humans have talked about atoms since the time of the ancients, and ever-smaller fundamental particles of matter followed. But no one even conceived of bits until the middle of the 20th century. The bit is a fundamental particle, too, but of different stuff altogether: information. It is not just tiny, it is abstract - a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. Now that scientists are finally starting to understand information, they wonder whether it’s more fundamental than matter itself. Perhaps the bit is the irreducible kernel of existence; if so, we have entered the information age in more ways than one." |
|
| February 13 | "Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel Corp. researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip ... 80 cores [on] a 275-square-millimeter, fingernail-size chip ... Intel ... [is] using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, conduct multimedia data mining, play photorealistic games and interact with artificial intelligence.
Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend." |
| February 27 | A new technology developed at Keio University carries with it the possibility that bacterial DNA could be used as a medium for storing digital information long-term--potentially thousands of years. "Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire. The universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it -- on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis." |
| Henry M. Gladney issues his monograph, Preserving Digital Information, as a printed book. | |
| According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog. | |
| March 10 | According to an article in the New York Times entitled History Digitized (and Abridged), which points out that economic and copyright considerations require the digitization of library and archival collections to be very selective, the U.S. National Archives estimates that at the current rate of digitization of its 9 billion text records, it could take 1800 years to convert the paper text records in the National Archives to digital form. |
| May 31 | The genome of James D. Watson, co-discover of the double-helical structure of DNA, is sequenced and presented to Watson. It is the second individual human genome to be sequenced. The first was that of J. Craig Venter, which was sequenced in the human genome project completed in 2001. |
| September | There are more than 2,000,000 articles in the English language Wikipedia. The Wikipedia exists in more than 100 languages. More than 75,000 active contributors edit a total of around 5,300,000 articles in the various versions of the Wikipedia. |
| September 7 | MySpace has over 200,000,000 accounts. |
| September 27 | "An innovative tool to analyse and identify computer file formats has won the 2007 Digital Preservation Award. DROID, developed by The National Archives in London, can examine any mystery file and identify its format. The tool works by gathering clues from the internal 'signatures' hidden inside every computer file, as well as more familiar elements such as the filename extension (.jpg, for example), to generate a highly accurate 'guess' about the software that will be needed to read the file. . . . "Now, by using DROID and its big brother, the unique file format database known as PRONOM, experts at the National Archives are well on their way to cracking the problem. Once DROID has labelled a mystery file, PRONOM's extensive catalogue of software tools can advise curators on how best to preserve the file in a readable format. The database includes crucial information on software and hardware lifecycles, helping to avoid the obsolescence problem. And it will alert users if the program needed to read a file is no longer supported by manufacturers. "PRONOM's system of identifiers has been adopted by the UK government and is the only nationally-recognised standard in its field." |
| November | The Watchtower has an average semi-monthly printing on paper of 28,578,000 copies in 161 languages. This may be the largest and most linguistically diverse circulation printed on paper of any periodical. |
| The Universal Digital Library has scanned over 1,000,000 books, surpassing its original goal set in 2001. Nearly 1,000,000 of the books are in Chinese. | |
| It has been estimated that more than 4.7 billion Bibles (in whole or in part) have been printed. That is more than five times the estimated number of 900 million printed copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the enormous distribution of which occurred becuase it was "an unoffical requirement for every Chinese ciitzen to own, read and carry it at all times under the latter half of Mao's rule, and especially during the Cultural Revolution." | |
| The Universal Digital Library estimates that there are "no more than 10,000,000 unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 300 million since the beginning of recorded history." | |
| November 19 | Amazon.com introduces the Kindle.This unconventially-named e-book reader differs from other e-book readers because it incorporates a wireless service for purchasing and delivering electronic texts without a computer. The 6 inch electronic-paper screen is limited to grayscale at 167ppi resolution. 90,000 titles are available for download to the 10 oz. device at its introduction. The device can store about 200 books. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
April 29, 2008
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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